h1. Introduction

(work in progress)

"OpenAtlas":https://openatlas.eu is an open source database software developed especially to acquire, edit and manage research data from various fields of humanities.
This page (work in progress) tries to give an introduction for interested software developers.

h2. What does it

* Acquire cultural heritage data: data can be entered via forms or imported through various means.
* Structure data. Many functions are available
* Connect data to other reference systems (e.g. Wikidata, GeoNames, ...) 
* Data check functions
* Basic visualization to help with data entry
* Export data into various formats for further processing (e.g. social network analyses, archiving, ...) or display (e.g. maps) 

h2. Technologies

To provide a web interface to enable users to enter and structure data following technologies used are:
* "Python":https://www.python.org (Python Software Foundation License), an interpreted, high-level, general-purpose programming language.
* "Flask":https://palletsprojects.com/p/flask/ (BSD), a micro web framework, written in Python, with the ability to scale up to complex applications.
* "PostgreSQL":https://www.postgresql.org/ (PostgreSQL License), a free and open source relational database management system, with the
** "PostGIS":https://postgis.net extension (GPL 2 or later), a spatial database extender for PostgreSQL which adds support for geographic objects.
* "HTML 5":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5 with "Jinja":https://palletsprojects.com/p/jinja/, a full-featured template engine for Python with full Unicode support.
* "CSS":https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS/ with "Bootstrap":https://getbootstrap.com/, a free and open source CSS framework.
* "JavaScript":https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Javascript

h2. Development

We are using "Git":https://git-scm.com/ for version control and the main repository is located on "GitHub":https://github.com/craws/OpenAtlas
* Application structure, see "manual":https://manual.openatlas.eu/technical/application_structure.html
* Database structure, see "manual":https://manual.openatlas.eu/technical/database_structure.html

h3. Standards

* Tests
* Coding standards

h2. Model

Our data model is based on CIDOC CRM

h3. CIDOC CRM

* OpenAtlas classes
* Shortcuts

h3. Database

* Specification in database

h3. Model in code

h2. Views

h2. Templates

* Jinja2

h2. API